For me, guaranteed drops ruin farming, and an ARPG w/ no farming is a dead ARPG (In my opinion of course).
Based on design choices it appears that the devs have chosen to discourage one of the things I love most about ARPG’s… that is farming. Specifically boss farming.
Guaranteed drops
A multiple monolith barrier and quests to get to each Boss.
A perfect example of a missed opportunity for replay value is Orchirian The Rampant.
A 100% chance to drop a unique that has 0% variation in stats. Once you’ve killed Orchirian on just one of your softcore characters he is rendered irrelevant. Make his unique item drop less often, and make the stats on it variable and you’ve increased replayability on that one mob.
Boss farming hasn’t been discouraged - quite the opposite, actually.
The new monolith bosses is exactly what you want - they drop new uniques which have varying stats and are farmable. Oh, and their loot is affected by the modifiers … higher modifiers, better chance of higher rolls.
And the blessings - re-running bosses to either improve or change them.
But then you go on to say that the game needs more of it. Did you have a change of heart after you thought of the Orchirian?
The campaign bosses are far from finished as they have mentioned most of them will be revisited. The new MoF bosses do each have a chance to drop a cool unique. Some have 100% of 1 and a small % to drop a more rare 2nd one.
How many monoliths will I have to do, in order to farm Rahyeh say… 5 times?
I can tell you it took me 22 monoliths for my first encounter, 36 monoliths for my second encounter with Rahyeh. 58 monliths for 2 boss encounters. I certainly wouldn’t consider that “farming” by any stretch.
I do not agree that guaranteed boss drops ruin farming.
It depends on how you interpret guaranteed drops. For me I do not believe that a boss should always (100%) drop a particular unique and nor do I believe that a drop should be locked to a specific boss and never be available from another boss.
I do believe that a specific unique can be ‘assigned’ to a specific boss with a higher than average drop rate when compared to bosses with the same unique in their loot pool.
This promotes farming a specific boss to increase your chances of getting a specific unique, but does not preclude you from getting the same drop as a random from another boss.
I believe bosses should have loot pools with customisability - a particular boss like Orchirian could have a higher chance (maybe +10% max) to drop his unique but then he has a loot pool matching his particular type - maybe he has a higher +5% drop rate for nature related uniques/set items and then the general boss loot pool which drops from all bosses with varying but common drop rates per item.
So you could farm any boss for any unique but you get higher drop rates for specific uniques and improved drop rates for uniques matching the type of boss you are farming.
Probably tricky to implement programatically but hey… just my two cents…
Exactly. You’ve just disagreed and agreed with me in the first paragraph.
Currently the drop rate for woven flesh is around 85% (You’d have to be pretty unlucky not to get it on your first try). I have killed him 3 times and gotten 3 Woven flesh. What is my motivation for killing him again? And keep in mind this isn’t a situation where I log in, run through a zone or two to get to him… I have to complete 20-30 monoliths to get another crack.
If you have 8 characters you’ll most likely end up with 7 or 8 woven flesh in your shared stash just by killing him once w/ each character. Hardly a motivation to farm him right?
Having one boss specific item that has a much lower drop rate certainly increases the bosses farmability… but that “farmability” is tempered by the fact that you have to go through 20-30 (or more) monoliths to get to him each time. That kind of effort to get to a boss, really challenges the definition of farming in my opinion. If you play for a couple hours day, you might not be able to kill the same boss more than a couple times a week.
The kind of farming I’m used to and enjoy, doesn’t seem to exist in this game.
I killed the Architect 11 times once during the campaign. She doesn’t have a rare item that drops from her (that I know of). She didn’t drop shit. I got nothing from her but vendor fodder after 11 tries. I could have kept going, and probably gotten one of the unique items that I’ve gotten a dozen times already. But I’ve gotten that same crap from vases and crates.
I have not specifically tested farming boss drops but it soulds like the drop rate example you have given re Woven Flesh is far too high and if this is true for other unique/boss combinations then that would be problematic long term.
I figure there are two indirect issues also at play here:
limited uniques - I have found that unique drops are generally quite satisfactory wrt. drop rates - at the moment on two chars, I have a total unique/set drop count that matches my level… i.e. combined I have 120 odd char levels and roughly 120 odd unique/set items. However… there are simply not enough “unique” uniques in the game which could have an effect on drop rates/variety/duplicates and how the devs have skewed the rates for specific bosses.
its way to early to be sure on drop rates for this game… there are times as you refer to with the Architect where bloody all drops - not even a rare… Purple (T6) drop rates are messed up (far too low). Monotlith rarity calcs dont make sense to me - I get more uniques in 20-30% rarity boosts than I do in 60%+ - consistently.
Anyway… sure a dev will skim this and a penny will drop as to what to do…
Exactly, and while I may disagree with you, I think it is (usually) entirely worthwhile? Relevant? Valid? Feedback for the devs to receive because (I believe) it represents honestly held beliefs from a different viewpoint than my own. And EHG wants feedback from a multitude of different viewpoints so that they can be made aware of things they hadn’t thought of before.
IMO, you wouldn’t farm the monolith boss for th 85% chance drop item, you’re probably farming it for the 14% chance item. IMO, if you’re farming a particular boss, you’re probably running through the monoliths as fast as you can. Does it take too much time to spawn a boss? I don’t know, but I suspect that the devs probably don’t want boss farming to be like Pindleskin and Baal runs in D2 where it takes a minute or two to get to the boss (or even where it takes longer to leave the game and rejoin than it does to get to the boss!) and then a few seconds to kill the boss.
Right… I agree except that the boss is buried behind 20-30 monoliths. Lets say for the sake of argument you are geared up and classed well enough that you can speed run a monolith in an average of 5 minutes. My two encounters with Rahyeh came at monolith 22, and 36. But lets just say 25 monoliths on average to get to Rahyeh. Everything goes perfectly, you don’t die. We’ll assume there is a loot filter so no time wasted scanning loot. I think that’s a pretty optimistic timeline, and that puts you at one boss fight every 1 hour 25 minutes for your 14% chance.
That’s hardly farming in my opinion.
That is like having to play all of act III in its entirety to kill Mephisto.
It is farming though, you’re killing a specific boss for some specific loot, you’re just doing it slowly. If I’m only able to do one monolith per day, does that mean I’m not doing the monolith because I’m doing it slowly?
I don’t have to do all of act III to kill Mephisto do I?
Once you get to Rahyeah…kill him…and fail at getting the 14% drop you get to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. All of it. YaY. (and lets be honest, 1 hour 25 minutes is hugely optimistic). Keep in mind the mobs aren’t scaling either. Fun times.
If that’s your idea of farming we have different ideas on farming.
Maybe. IMO, farming would be killing a specific thing for a specific drop, since the only things that have specific drops are the Monolith bosses (& Orchirian, but who cares about his petals), that what would be concidered farming in LE. If you could go to a particular area to try & drop something (like Titan Quest & Grim Dawn’s MIs) than that would be farming as well.
No, but you could also probably run through act 3 to get to Mephisto pretty quickly (if you didn’t have to bother doing quests & killing stuff). But it boils down to a single fact, this game is designed to be slower than most other aRPGs. Maybe it’s too slow & the devs need to tweak things to aleviate that & I’m happy to have that discussion, but we need to be honest with ourselves that that is what we’re saying, not that "oh this isn’t farming because I can’t do it 30-60 times an hour*…
Indeed we do (and that’s fine, as I said in anther thread, you’re allowed to think differently, I’m allowed to think you’re wrong and vice versa). My view on farming is that it’s killing specific mobs to get specific things to drop. Your view seems to be the same but with a minimum speed limit attached.
Could they do with making it a bit quicker, probably, IMO.
I think that might have more to do with how you farm. Some others might say that if you’re not just sprinting through the areas going straight to the monolith objective & killing it with the most OP build they can put together, you’re not farming.
Well, you could do the empowered version if you want better drops while you slog through the monoliths.
I’m not willing to defend the notion that one should to do 20-30 monoliths (or more) for the opportunity to fight a boss that has an 85% chance to drop something I already have, and a 14% chance to drop something I might want.
But you are.
I’m going to quote myself here:
"Based on design choices it appears that the devs have chosen to discourage one of the things I love most about ARPG’s… that is farming. Specifically boss farming.
Guaranteed drops
A multiple monolith barrier and quests to get to each Boss."
So I ask you LLama8, two questions:
Does putting the boss behind 20 to 30 (or more) monoliths encourage or discourage farming of said boss?
Does having the boss drop something that you all ready have (85% drop chance on atrophy) encourage or discourage farming of said boss?
You can answer those questions or we can argue more about what farming is.
suppose I did.